


LOST: Hairless Cat, Answers to Horatio

by iimpavid



Category: Finder (Comics)
Genre: Aliens, Cats, FINDER (comics) - Freeform, Gen, Slice of Life, anvard is a termite mound
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-04
Updated: 2017-11-04
Packaged: 2019-01-29 06:48:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12625497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iimpavid/pseuds/iimpavid
Summary: Jaeger weighs the drive in his hand. It’s no larger than his thumb. A name and IP address engraved on its body. If it’s glittery fox-head cap were removed it would reveal a jack meant to plug directly into a kid’s brain. There’s more to it, probably, but More or less.He shudders.The IP address is the same sort Marcie’s got. This is a student’s. And nobody carries around external drives if they’ve got the money and self-preservation to help it— so a student and a broke one at that.Jaeger glances back over his shoulder at the street vendor, up the pipe venting oxygen down from the day districts. Rolls gleaming yellow eyes toward the ceiling and sighs. “Fuckin’ fine.”





	1. Call for a Good Time

Charity Maddox doesn’t sleep enough and her holo-visual display is blurring with it. Sleep is for people who don’t have deadlines. **  
**

Rush-hour pedestrian traffic packs people onto the roads of Anvard like sardines and there’s no way she’s going to be late for a lecture of Dr. Miller’s even if it means saving the most-recent draft of her thesis to an external cranial drive because grad school has pushed her Bachelor’s student-level RAM to its limits and the notifications to defragment her brain have been keeping her up at night. The drive falls unnoticed from Charity’s backpack. End-over-end through a gap in the railing at the edge of the highway. Bounces off the shoulder of some unlucky child who promptly screams, flails, bats away the unseen assailant.

 

The drive’s journey doesn’t end there. It doesn’t hit a wall but slides into a vent. Screeching titanium against titanium, in a stroke of luck, ricochets against a girder spiraling around and down into a twilight district market. Lands with a spray in a basket full of peacock blue pepper. Kicking up an eye-watering cloud that has the street swearing and clearing out.

 

The hand that picks it out of a basket is tattooed with a simple motif: lines like railroad tracks running parallel to the knuckles, just above where the thumb meets the palm. Fading dots at the top of every tie.

 

Jaeger weighs the drive in his hand. It’s no larger than his thumb. A name and IP address engraved on its body. If it’s glittery fox-head cap were removed it would reveal a jack meant to plug directly into a kid’s brain. There’s more to it, probably, but More or less.

 

He shudders.

 

The IP address is the same sort Marcie’s got. This is a student’s. And nobody carries around external drives if they’ve got the money and self-preservation to help it— so a student and a broke one at that.

 

Jaeger glances back over his shoulder at the street vendor, up the pipe venting oxygen down from the day districts. Rolls gleaming yellow eyes toward the ceiling and sighs. “Fuckin’ fine.”

 

He ducks into the next alleyway, latches onto a drainpipe and starts climbing. To passersby it’s as if he was never there in the first place.

 

Day districts. There’s an eerie blue cast to everything that no one else seems to see.

 

Jaeger runs along the highway guardrail, pleasantly warm from the climb, feet aligning perfectly on the narrow rail’s rounded top. It’s hard not to think about holding a stranger’s memory in his fist and he thinks about the smell stuck to the drive instead, that she probably hasn’t had the chance to shower so she’s wearing too much deodorant smelling like fake citrus and the legend of stale soap. Fresh-dyed hair. The powdered chemical lavender of dryer sheets rubbed through it to take out the grease.

 

He picks out that thread and follows it right to a lecture hall, under-filled for Anvard but that’s not any of his damn business.

 

The girl, Charity, is easy to spot. Standing at a table digging through a backpack spattered with paint, probably as an act of rebellion. Her hair’s unwashed Medawar-brown, coming out of its braid, reeking of panic– but she’s definitely Medawar nonetheless if the pressed pleats of her skirt are anything to go by. Sucks to be her. Or it did until he walked in.

 

He drops the drive into her open backpack.

 

She stops, jerks back like he’s reached out and groped her. “Wha— oh my god— thank you. Thank you!”

 

“Don’t thank me. It’s probably busted.”

 

But she isn’t listening, already plugging it into her head because the best thing to do with an external cranial drive that may or may not be corrupted is to shove it directly into your brain. Nauseous, Jaeger sits down heavily near the door and pointedly doesn’t watch Charity-the-Desperate-Medawar for seizures.

 

Nothing like desperate college kids to give a guy a little perspective on life.

 

When Dr. Miller strides into class, she is five minutes early, and each strike of her heel against the tile flooring signifies a lessening in the noise of the room. Until she reaches the podium at which she speaks and begins pulling notebooks, pens, and a laser pointer from her courier bag. Everything about her is just to the left of normal. From the pile of white blonde hair braided and piled high atop her head, to the unusually eerie green of her eyes.

 

Or that fact that even in five inch pumps she stands a good head shorter than virtually every person in the room.

 

She opens the class, not in Common, but in Nyima.

 

“ _I expect every last one of you to have completed your term papers. Please recall do not turn in your papers electronically. I won’t receive them._ ”

 

The class groans in unison.

 

Charity-the-desperate-Medawar doesn’t start seizing but she does look crushed when her professor strides in growling in Nyima. How such a tiny vanilla-scented academic spent enough time among lions to learn their language is enough to draw Jaeger’s attention. Charity doesn’t have a seizure but the term paper’s on the drive currently stuck into her temporal lobe but not written in a notebook like the ones being handed down rows toward the center aisle. When the stack passes Jaeger he slips a flier from his back pocket into the middle, weatherbeaten and faded for an uptown prize fight that was lost some months ago, scrawls a number on the back:  _227-803-8107-7_. It never hurts to try and scare up some business someplace new.

 

He can see why they’d be upset; the only thing harder to come by than paper is books.

 

He slouches a bit lower in his seat as the lecture begins, the beading on the back of his jacket scraping against the plastic seat back with the slightest noise, barely louder than the rhythmic tapping of students miming typing on keyboards their skull computers project beneath their fingers so they can take notes. A few ambitious souls are doing it the old fashioned way: with pen and paper. 

 

Dr. Miller swaps between languages as she teaches, describing with eloquence her most-recent journey outside the city to work with Nyiman linguists— Jaeger focuses at that, gleaming yellow eyes darting from the door to the doctor. The Nyima were renowned for many, many things, but not their linguistics, and his curiosity is a fatal flaw.

 

She never turns away from him completely. She’s ambidextrous and writes absently with whichever hand suits her while directly addressing the class. Her scrawl is a looping, elegant thing. Several students pause and ask her to spell in print the occasional word. She does, but she often makes a point to single those particular students out for prompted questions.

 

The lecture on the Nyima linguistics– “–trends in language evolve often from dialect and colloquialism. For those new to the class–” she levels a lambent gaze pointedly at Jaeger in the back of the room, “–what this means is that there are minute tonal differences in specific word trees and phrasal trees which can. In any given circumstance, lead to a challenge or a marriage proposal.” She smiles, a beatific, thousand watt kind of smile that transforms her entire face and says, “I spent time with my father as a girl traveling outside of the dome, when I was working on my first doctorate I discovered this–” She lifts the hem of the clearly expensive cream colored blouse to reveal the old healed scars from claws.

 

“I survived obviously, my father is Medawar and wouldn’t have ever considered taking me from the dome if I couldn’t defend myself. Still– ” Her smile turned cheeky and she continued, “So the Nyima developed methods for teaching what would in layman’s terms be considered ‘trade speak’ not to be confused with the common tongue which we all speak to communicate. From this, several dialects developed and further spread as diaspora amongst the varying clans.–” She continues on in the vein, scrawling on the chalkboard in an even hand what are presumably the phonetic renderings of key words and phrases.

 

Three students have clearly begun recording this section of the class, looks of consternation and despair on their faces.

 

The professor’s assistant stands at the front of the room, alphabetizing notebooks at a small table. He’s Ascian and Jaeger’s pretty sure they were on the same side of a bar fight once. Pretty sure. Not that that loyalty’s stuck around much— he’s not returning any of the desperate eye contact Jaeger attempts to make to solicit assistance. So much for kith and kin.

 

And so it goes. Dr. Miller teaches, stares up the lecture hall at him. He stares right back. He gives as good as he gets.

 

He wonders, briefly, how close she came to bleeding out after nearly losing her liver to a Nyiman warrior’s claws. How many weeks it was before she and her beloved father were able to move camp back toward the city again, Medawar medical skills or no. She fidgets between bullet points, dusting chalk from her fingers onto the tight-woven fabric of her skirt, occasionally patting it and growing the white dots into clouds across the side of her left thigh.

 

Even from the back of the room Jaeger can smell it wafting with every word she writes, dry and heavy on the back of his tongue, just shy of a sneeze or thirst. He wrinkles his nose. The staring is making his skin itch more than anything else. Every odd second or so she glances away but that hardly counts.

 

Annoyed Jaeger finally raises his hand, doesn’t bother to wait for her to formally acknowledge him before he interrupts with, “Does your model account for the males and the virus that gives ‘em sentience? Do they learn differently through the infection?”

 

She pauses and dusts her thigh off and then pauses, that’s– she beams. A startled, utterly pleased sort of look and says, “Yes. Actually– the standard brain localizes language in the left hemisphere in the frontal lobe, and then in a secondary location in the anterior right hemisphere. For males of the Nyima, once they are infected the language centers alter.” She sketches out a (frankly terrible) drawing of a brain and began labeling it, “So in the area which we would consider the temporal lobe and Wernicke’s region is where the virus causes the most explicit and obvious development. This is also, likely why the deterioration of language skills is so apparent.”

 

She turned toward the class, hip cocked, “But that’s actually an excellent question and the perfect segue into everyone’s assigned reading for the week–”

 

Jaeger sighs through his nose. A Nyiman linguistics lecture is not how he wanted to spend his morning— at the College of The Art, sure, but it’s not like it’s a dance class. That’d’ve made the morning worth his while. Although he still has time to look up Vary. If she’s around maybe not all hope is lost for the day.


	2. Horatio

  
He has to get out of the city.

 

Anvard is a termite mound and Jaeger has reached his capacity for pest control but there’s no easy way for an undocumented Ascian to get out of the dome and he wants to keep his clothes, not to mention his skin, so the river is out of the question. He slouches through the night level, illuminated by the blue glow of advertising vines clinging to the chain link fences that surround vacant lots. The lots are full of refuse that falls from the brighter levels above like the floor of the ocean. His baby brother lives around here, he thinks, or lived around here. Bought a house all his own. Paid for it out of pocket, proud as anything.

 

He could find Royal’s place if he wanted.

 

The thought makes his skin tighten over his chest and a smell like gasoline and sulfur blows up from a sewer grate. Jaeger sneezes. Gags.

 

Yeah, he’s going to leave Anvard tonight if it kills him.

 

The sound coming from the alley off the beaten down offshoot of Kingsroad might be a trash grizzly. The hobo fleeing for his life from the alley is a pretty good indicator that it should be a trash grizzly. Jaeger, in no hurry to repeat his last experience with trash grizzlies.

 

They had sat below his perch for hours while he’d lain bleeding on a ledge for hours, tapping the creepy little fingers of their creepy little hands together beneath their manes and chatting with each other:

 

“It’s such a shame— I hope it doesn’t have a mate and young somewhere.”

 

“Well even if it does that’s the way of nature—”

 

“—Red in tooth and claw.”

 

“Mhmm. Do you suppose it’ll be good in a quiche?”

 

They could have climbed right up to him but that would have spoiled the fun of waiting for him to pass out and drop off the side of the building. Or something.

 

Jaeger crosses the street.

 

Except he makes a mistake. Stops halfway across and looks back over his shoulder as he catches up with the hobo and it’s not a trash grizzly that comes bounding out of the alley. It’s a cat. A hairless cat in a green dinosaur sweater, its six blue eyes innocently blinking from underneath the hood.

 

He stares at it. “You’ve gotta be kiddin’ me.”

 

A taxi narrowly misses running him down; Jaeger leaps out of the way, back toward the cat on the sidewalk. It stares up at him for a moment with lamplight gleaming off its collar. The address etched on the heart-shaped tag— anatomical, not valentine— is from about five hundred feet higher than the current locale. Maybe it’s the mutant-strain six-eyed thing the cat’s got going on but it understands a little too much about what it sees.

 

He glares down at it. “What’re you lookin’ at, punk?”

 

It bolts.

 

“Hey!” He takes off after it for the sake of the hunt. He’ll catch it, sure, return it to it’s distraught owner, but this is self-serving.

 

Up fire-escapes, under pipelines, through the bowels of mainframes serving the greater good that is the moloch of media in Anvard. It comes down to the sound of Jaeger’s boots slipping across pavement, pipes, grates, and gravel with his lungs and heart lunging in tandem with his hands— the cat’s spiny tail is always half an inch too far out of reach. Every failure leaves Jaeger not smiling but bearing his teeth, pleased, and inching closer to exhaustion.

 

Uptown again no less than a mile southwest of the University Jaeger gets sideswiped by an asshole leaske pulling a rickshaw full of out-dome tourists who screech in dismay. The force yanks his shoulder out of his socket, cracks his skull hard enough he sees stars and for a blessed moment his ears ring and the sounds of the city go quiet. He stumbles. Parks himself to the left of an irate mouse bladder vendor— a good buffer between the public and the nauseating visual that is himself fucking around with his deadened left arm until his shoulder slips back into place with an audible, searing crack.

 

The cat, not a fold of its dinosaur sweater out of place, lets out a plaintive meow from the vicinity of his ankles.

 

“Yeah, yeah, tell me about it. Hey— That wasn’t an invitation!” It climbs his jeans and the back of his jacket until it can drape itself around his neck. It’s purr is louder than a creature that small should be able to produce and it vibrates through Jaeger’s body. He can feel it in the soles of his boots.

 

That’s not enough, though. It starts kneading him. Claws digging sharp and strident into the skin left exposed above his collarbone. Jaeger hisses, reaches up to stop the cat, only to get swatted for his impertinence.

 

“You’re more trouble than you’re worth.” While he’d like to toss the cat into a sack and dropkick the sack in the river something instinctive suggests he would be better off with a den of trash grizzlies than trying that.

 

Dizzy, head aching, he makes for the address on the cat’s collar.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Tumblr.](https://papermoon-cardboardsea.tumblr.com/) [Twitter.](https://twitter.com/iimpavid)

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr.](https://papermoon-cardboardsea.tumblr.com/) [Twitter.](https://twitter.com/iimpavid)


End file.
